“Some of the best ice cream in the city is hiding away in Kurt Farm Shop...”

Kurt Farm Shop is a gem of a store tucked into the Chophouse Row building on Capitol Hill in Seattle. The Farm Shop is primarily about ice cream but we also sell cheeses from Kurtwood Farms and other Washington State creameries. The ice cream is exceptional and unique. The custard base is made at the farm on Vashon Island with our Jersey cream and milk, organic cane sugar and fresh, pastured eggs. It is then churned and flavored at the store kitchen in Seattle. Rich, luxurious and not too sweet, this ice cream is special. The flavors also come from the farm: lemon verbena, Tri-star strawberries, rose geranium, Triple Crown blackberries, bay laurel, Sungold tomato jam among others. We sell ice cream in cones and pints to go.

Shop Hours

Monday - Wednesday noon - 6Thursday - Sunday noon - 9

The Cheese

The cheese of Kurtwood Farms is farmstead cheese, meaning that it is made on the farm from the milk produced on this farm. The milk that goes into our cheeses all comes from the cows that live on this farm. No milk is brought in from any other source. All of the cheeses are made by hand, wrapped by hand and always available at the Farm Shop.

Dinah’s Cheese

Dinah’s Cheese is our original cheese. A bloomy-rind cheese, it resembles a traditional French Camembert. The fatty, Jersey milk gives it a deep golden color, and when fully ripe will be gooey and full flavored.

Log House Cheese

Log House is a semi-hard tomme-style cheese aged for four months. Made from whole milk, it is rich and buttery with a mottled, grey natural rind.

The Books

Farm Food, Volume II; Spring & Summer

Farm Food, Volume II is published by Cookhouse Publishing Co and contain photographs, recipes and essays on life at Kurtwood Farms.

Farm Food, Volume I; Fall & Winter

Growing A Feast

The story of a feast two years in the making, from the farmer who harvested the vegetables, raised the animals, and prepared the meal. In Growing a Farmer, Kurt Timmermeister recounted the toil and joy of wrestling an empty plot of land on Vashon Island, Washington, into a dairy farm. Now he tells the story of a feast made from only what the farm provides. But the story of the meal begins two years earlier with the birth of a calf, Alice. When she is grown, Alice will produce the cream to be churned into butter, made into sauce Béarnaise, and served alongside poached eggs and kale gathered the morning of the feast. Along the way we meet Leda, who trades onion seedlings for Kurt’s cheese; Michiko, who forages the white chanterelles for the antipasti course; and Bill, whose large, thin-skinned tomatoes will form the basis of the tomato upside-down cake. Rich in detail, resonant in story, Growing a Feast depicts the effort behind every meal, the farm that comes before every table.

Growing A Farmer

When he purchased four acres of land on Vashon Island, Kurt Timmermeister was only looking for an affordable home near the restaurants he ran in Seattle. But as he slowly settled into his new property, he became awakened to the connection between what he ate and where it came from: a hive of bees provided honey, a young cow could give fresh milk, an apple orchard allowed him to make vinegar. With refreshing honesty, Timmermeister details the initial stumbles and subsequent realities he faced as he established a profitable farm for himself. Personal yet practical, Growing a Farmer will entirely recast the way we think about our relationship to the food we consume.

Kurt

Kurt Timmermeister was born in 1962 in the heart of Seattle, no where near farm country. Anticipating working in foreign service, he graduated from the American College in Paris with a degree in International Affairs. While in Paris he realized his love of food and restaurants far surpassed his affinity for government work and he returned to Seattle to begin a career in food service.

A series of restaurant jobs both in the kitchen and dining room gave him the early hubris to open his own café at the age of twenty-four. For eighteen years he ran a series of ever larger Café Septiemes while at the same time beginning his education in small scale farming.

In 1991 he moved to Vashon Island, buying land that was to eventually become Kurtwood Farms.

The Farm

The farm began as four acres of overgrown blackberry brambles with rusted out cars and cast off junk hidden beneath the canopy of weeds. Little by little the four acres was cleaned out and planted with fruit and nut trees, vegetables and herbs. Once more land was acquired, pastures were created and fenced and sheep, pigs and cows arrived. By 2004 with the restaurants behind him, Kurtwood Farms had become his full time job.

Soon a professional kitchen was built to begin processing the food grown on the farm and to create a space for friends to gather for dinners of ever greater quality and scope. Progress on the enterprise continued with a Grade ‘A’ dairy licensed in the newly built dairy buildings and a cow barn raised to house the bovine producers of that milk. A underground cheese cave, dug deep under the cow pasture rounds out the facilities on the farm to produce the finest farmstead cheeses.

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Get In Touch

Come by for ice cream in cones and pints to go. The hours at the Farm Shop vary depending on the season.